The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild

04 Aug 2014 • securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be

Regarding canvas fingerprinting:

To further test this hypothesis, we ran all of our tests on 5 identically-provisioned lab computers, running Firefox 11 on Windows XP. As expected, all five computers produced iden- tical results on each test, providing further evidence that our fingerprints are stable across identical hardware and soft- ware stacks. Additionally, we note that our fingerprints are unable to distinguish between users who use the exact same hardware and software.

This is kind of neat, but ultimately pretty boring to me. The hardware I’m running on isn’t necessarily a huge secret. Maybe it’s worse though when this is used as part of a larger cocktail of things to pin down ones identify.

The CSS :visited hack seems a lot more serious of a problem to me.